Excerpt: skill challenges

[DonAdam]

*shrug* I was envisioning the PCs cornering the wife in her room at night and demanding she talk to him or else.

Slow your roll. This is D&D, not FATAL.

I don't have a problem with making some actions inherently counterproductive to certain challenges. Seems logical and obvious from a broad design standpoint.

As for the Duke scenario in particular, I think the approach of fixed contextual DC's and making some skills irrelevant is vastly more realistic than previous editions. Social skills were basically bludgeons to get what you wanted. I had a problem with it being automatic for the NPCs just as I have a problem with it being automatic for the PCs. Persuasion of any kind should be context dependent, so I'm happy to see that its decisive here.

I really hope they get the DC's right. Multiple rolls certainly helps. Given the 3.5 DC's, it was all up to circumstance bonuses anyway. Which meant it was all up to DM fiat. That seemed alot more like railroading.

Also, signaling that you can use any skill within reason works great if you've got an active group of good roleplayers. Two things can break that down:

1) Quiet players. If I want to highlight their character's abilities, I might need to custom tailor a situation in which they can shine. Completely open-ended skills might allow the more active party members (Thor bless them) to steal the spotlight. Creativity is great, but its not the only thing that matters at the table.

2) Disruptive players. I'm sorry, but I just can't see designing a scenario with open-ended skill checks for a one-shot, con or gameday. The average player is just too weird, and in those one-shot scenarios they have hyperbolic discount rates since it's a one-shot. They're going to see what they can get away with. And no, I don't want to deal with that "in game" or after the fact.

 

[Frostmarrow]

No, it's about making them afraid of YOU. It's not "Scare," it's "Intimidate." It's a personal, martial fear-inducing ability emanating from the perception that you can do HORRIBLE things to people.

I think intimidate is a stupid skill. First it is stupid that an epic character who lack the skill can't intimidate anyone. Second, the community is not agreeing intuitively on what the skill does. Is it based on strength or charisma? Why don't I get a bonus from being ugly? Why can't I use it to scare people of other threats? Get rid of it and add Authority instead.

 

[AllisterH]

Intimidation is about making people afraid of the consequences of not doing what you say.

It DOES NOT HAVE TO BE "Help me or I'll hit you in the face". If that's all intimidate is, chuck the skill entirely, because characters can threaten to hit people in the face without it, and how scary that prospect is has very little to do with their charisma, and you're basically condemning anyone who takes the skill as their social skill to sit out of 90% of negotiations."..

I think you might be getting Diplomacy and Intimidate mixed up. Diplomacy is basically convincing the target that your position on a topic is actually THEIR position on a topic.

I honestly cannot think of an adventuring scenario where there can be no possible way that the fears of the target simply cannot be played upon at all. Bad things live on the borderlands. Someone else might get the treasure first. Another duke is massing forces.."..

But that doesn't actually make you trustworthy in the eyes of the duke. At best, you're going to have the Duke say "ok, I'll let you go there" whereas the setup we have is that the players actively want the Duke to help them ("providing troops, equipment, a writ of safe passage through another Duke's land"). Again, this excerpt is too short but you're also assuming that the Duke doesn't KNOW what is out on the borderlands...Maybe he is cut out from regular reports or it is the base of a major military force for the KING and thus private non-military citizens including even the Duke aren't allowed there

Bluff apparently covers lying to the NPC in just about any way - so if your players were to tell the NPC that there's horrible things on the borderlands when they know that they're lying, they'd get a success. But if there really ARE horrible things there, then they earn an automatic failure?

"While you may not trust us too closely lord, surely you trust lord blackheart less" or "While you send your scouts to confirm our story lord, your foes grow ever stronger"..

Why would they earn an automatic failure with the Bluff skill? If the PCs try to Bluff and say, "There are horrible things like Worgs" there, the Duke (the DM) s fully in his rights in my opinion to say, "I know, I have had to send out parties to wipe out those worg packs". It wouldn't constitue a success but neither would it be a failure. Personally, I would allow a Bluff reroll if they PCs go on to describe a Guulvorg and mention that it was protecting the smaller worgs and the Duke or his men had never seen such a creature but had heard about it.

The second part though, this is covered under Diplomacy. Intimidate _IS_ how well you can communicate potential violence towards the subject by yourself if your words are not heeded by the subject.

I can see why Celebrim was so unhappy as different players are going to interpret skill challenges differently.

 

[AllisterH]

I think intimidate is a stupid skill. First it is stupid that an epic character who lack the skill can't intimidate anyone. Second, the community is not agreeing intuitively on what the skill does. Is it based on strength or charisma? Why don't I get a bonus from being ugly? Why can't I use it to scare people of other threats? Get rid of it and add Authority instead.

Er, that's not true in 4E though...

Untrained in Intimidation is equal to half your level + cha bonus. So even the succubus we saw, has a +10 to her Intimidate roll

Assuming Intimidate works a la SAGA method, then ys, you can use it untrained...

 

[Frostmarrow]

Er, that's not true in 4E though...

Untrained in Intimidation is equal to half your level + cha bonus. So even the succubus we saw, has a +10 to her Intimidate roll

Assuming Intimidate works a la SAGA method, then ys, you can use it untrained...

Even though you might get free ranks, intimidate is still a bad choice for a skill. Intimidate has been misunderstood in every RPG I ever tried. There have been numerous attempts at fixing it but I doesn't work. If anything, in 4E, intimidate should be a power that does fear damage in a burst.

Sorry for derailing. Back to topic. (It really doesn't matter what I think about initmidate anyway as the books are printed.)

 

[Lurker37]

Intimidation is about making people afraid of the consequences of not doing what you say.

Not quite.

Intimidation is about making people afraid of what you will do if they do not do as you say. It is, by definition, about striking fear of you into them - but not necessarily fear of violence. You could threaten to reveal a dark secret (blackmail), threaten to foreclose on a loan, threaten to pull out of a treaty they desperately need you to remain in, threaten to pull out of a business deal that will ruin them if it falls through, threaten to publicly humiliate them, etc. The whole point is to convince the other party that you are both capable and willing to make something undesireable happen. It can be used to great effect in social situations, if done subtlety. It's just not something you use when you're trying to build trust, which the example clearly states you are.

Convincing people of danger from a third party is not intimidation. That's more an issue of convincing them of the truth of what you are saying, which is either bluff (if you are lying) or diplomacy (if you are not). You can't cow people into believing you, only into not calling you a liar to your face.

 

[pemerton]

Not much new info here, but this does at least tell us the Skill Challenge system isn't a silly "Roll high with a random skill and you succeed" system like some were suggesting.

I actually like the version that folks here were bandying about. It wasn't "Roll a random skill..." it was, "Do a little roleplaying and convince me that your skill is relevant to the challenge." I liked that. It strongly encouraged players to be engaged and creative.

I agree with Wulf. It will be interesting to see what the DMG says about this. In HeroWars published adventures suggest particular skills (with modifiers for difficulty, if appropriate) as relevant for particular contests, but not in order to be definitive but rather to give the GM a sense of the specturm of possibilities the contest opens up. Maybe the DMG will be similar.

LOL. Well, so much for 'narrativism' and 'distribution of narrative control'. Not only does the example skill challenge specify exactly what skills do and do not work, but it even specifies what action is involved in making each skill.

Hey, we haven't seen the whole chapter yet! And I don't agree that it "specifies what action is involved in making each skill": "You try to encourage the NPC to aid your quest using false pretenses", "You entreat the NPC for aid in your quest", "You empathize with the NPC and use that knowledge to encourage assistance" are simple descriptions of the skills in question: it is presumably still up to the player to explain in what their encouragement, entreating etc consists.

With that out of the way, I return to my claim that the primary point of skill challenges is to provide a frame work for non-combat challenges to be used in a tournament (or computer moderated format). The example skill challenge, for example, is easily translateable into a standard cRPG dialogue system.

I will continue with my claim that what matters is whether the dialogue (narration) produced by the players matters to the overall play experience. If not, then the skill challenge adds nothing to the game. But if it is taken to be in part constitutive of the ingame reality then that is a different matter (and something quite different from a computer-moderated or tournament experience).

I also like the concept of certain skills opening up other checks./QUOTE]

More interesting than I was expecting. The idea of using one skill to open up the easy use of another related skill to assist is pretty clever on their part.

Does 3E D&D have the concept of "augments" ie using one skill to faciliate another? If so, how does this compare?

Skill challenges as a concept is great and I'm anticipating other RPGs to snag this puppy real soon.

Didn't 4e snag this puppy from other RPGs?

 

[Torchlyte]

But that doesn't actually make you trustworthy in the eyes of the duke.

Who cares? This is the big problem with WotC's given example; the DM doesn't decide how the plot goes down, the players do. Why can't the players use intimidation to get what they want? Sure, maybe the DM wants them to negotiate, but when you enforce that will it's railroading.

 

[AndrewRogue]

Intimidate is pretty simple as far as skills go. The problem is most people don't really understand how it was intended (as near as I can discern from how the mechanics work).

Intimidate is supposed to be used to get others, WHO WOULD NOT NORMALLY BE INCLINED TO DO SO, to go along with you out of a fear of harm (with you/your presence as a focal point). What does this mean? It means that your epic fighter doesn't need to roll intimidate against Joe Blow commoner. He simply makes a small display of power, and Joe Blow (unless he has some reason to NOT be afraid of this) will bend over backwards to do whatever he says.

The fact is that intimidate is supposed to be used against people who you can't scare through other means at your disposal. Intimidate is intended to be something far more sinister. Yeah, dude with a big gun pointing at you? Scary? Sure. The natural reaction is to wet yourself and to listen. But what if you can take gunshots at pointblank in the face? Then, no matter how much that guy brandies about that gun, you aren't going to be scared. That's where Intimidate comes in.

Which, really, is why it doesn't work in this encounter and, to me, that makes sense. Hell, it can even work out in a perfectly sensible matter. The PCs repeatedly attempt to intimidate the Duke, thereby failing the encounter. However, they've also put him in a position where he can't decline their help. So, the encounter plays off like it had succeeded... until the Duke's men betray the PCs or something similar.

Really, this is a pretty cool and elegant system that I dig. I'd like to read more about "creating" them and running with off skills, but this satisfies me.

 

[FireLance]

Who cares? This is the big problem with WotC's given example; the DM doesn't decide how the plot goes down, the players do. Why can't the players use intimidation to get what they want? Sure, maybe the DM wants them to negotiate, but when you enforce that will it's railroading.

It's not a railroad. It's a cave-in blocking a tunnel through the mountains. The players can still choose from a few other alternate paths. Railroading is when all the alternate paths are closed except for the tunnel through the mountains (or whichever road the DM wants the PCs to take).